Night Sky, by Marty Blue Waters

When I was a little girl I often snuck out of the house at night — after everyone else was asleep. I wanted the stars all around me so I lay down in the middle of our big back yard and studied the sky.

Once I was a bit older and had a bike to ride, I expanded my view of the night. Pedaling only three blocks from our house brought me to the Kansas countryside. My dog Princess was always game for these little adventures and loved to trot along beside me. If I rode down a dirt road about a mile, I came to the perfect spot to stand in awe and have the deep night sky drop its starry curtain 360 degrees all around me.

The town did not put out much light pollution and I didn't even know what that was yet anyway, so the pitch black was a special friend. Even without a moon in the sky, I loved the way my eyes knew how to see the world in a new way, letting starlight guide me down the road. The Milky Way stretched across the sky like the yellow brick road. I felt I was walking down its path without even moving my legs. I knew where to find the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the North Star, Orion, and considered them all to be my best friends. On nights when the full moon rose up just after dark, it was so incredibly enormous and often an intensely orange color. It felt as though it were so close I could actually hop right onto it. These trips were a little trickier, however, because they happened in the late evening before the cover of deep night and before everyone was asleep.

If I saw headlights approaching from miles away, I hid in a ditch. There were no trees to hide behind for many miles. Usually I could tell who drove by because I recognized the car or pickup. There was a place called "Lovers Lane" not far from my favorite spot, so some late nights had more traffic than others. Even my dog knew how to hide under a wheel of my bike and not make a sound. We would crouch in that big ditch for a long time before we came back onto the road, usually waiting for the red tail lights to turn direction.

Meteor showers in August were such an incredible gift. And with a little luck, they happened during the New Moon when the world was at its darkest. The shooting stars would put on a fireworks show so spectacular it took my breath away. The most difficult part was not to get excited during the day and try to describe these night experiences to somebody — especially within earshot of my mom. She would skip the wonder of it all and read me the riot act about ever leaving the house at night again. Ever ever again. Ever never. Never.

So it stayed my own spectacular secret. And I knew I could trust my dog not to spill the beans. There was so much about me that my mother didn't know. Sometimes she would try to get me to talk and tell her about things I liked and why. Part of her would have loved to share my night sky with me, but I knew the other part of her — the Baptist part — would be the one to take charge of the situation. She would worry that the Devil was talking to me and getting me to love the dark of night too much. An intervention in the making. And that was a very dim and depressing road I would avoid religiously throughout my entire childhood.